Continual development and rapid improvement in wireless communications technology have lead the way to increased data rates and broad wireless functionality in many different environments, including the home and business environments. These developments and improvements have been driven in part by the widespread adoption of digital media, including high definition video and music. The most recent developments in wireless connectivity promise new functionality and data rates far exceeding rates that the 802.11n and the 802.11TGac standards provide. These recent developments include the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) and 802.11TGad 60 GHz wireless specifications.
The 60 Ghz specifications provides data transmission rates of up to 7 Gbps in a single stream, which is more than 10 times faster than the highest data rate that the 802.11n multiple input multiple output (MIMO) standard supports. Another benefit of the 60 GHz specifications is that devices in the 60 GHz ecosystem will have the bandwidth to wirelessly communicate significant amounts of information without performance compromises, thereby eliminating the current need for tangles of cables to physically connect devices. WiGig compliant devices may, as examples, provide wireless docking station capability and wirelessly stream high definition video content directly from a Blu-Ray player to a TV with little or no compression required.
Multiple devices may be communicating such streams to multiple different receivers, and each device may compete for channel time to deliver the stream. To deliver the desired user experience in such an environment, there is a need to meet latency and throughput requirements while limiting memory footprint requirements.